Summary: A Case for System Support for Concurrency Exceptions
Luis Ceze, Joseph Devietti, Brandon Lucia and Shaz Qadeer
University of Washington
{luisceze, devietti, blucia0a}@cs.washington.edu

Microsoft Research
qadeer@microsoft.com
Abstract
In this position paper we argue that concurrency errors
should be fail-stop. We want to put concurrency errors in
the same category as division-by-zero, segmentation fault
in unmanaged languages and cast exceptions in managed
languages. This would make nondeterminism in multi-
threaded execution be much more manageable. Concur-
rency exceptions would improve the debugging process
during development and make crashes due to concurrency
errors that happen in the field be more descriptive. Our
goal in this paper is to justify our position, propose a
general approach to concurrency exceptions and discuss
system requirements and implications. Specifically, we